Major Microsoft products lose Facebook integration
Social integration is a key aspect of Microsoft's vision for its most prominent consumer-facing products. For instance, on Outlook.com you can have a Skype conversation, on Skype you can chat with Facebook friends, and on Windows Phone you can see your contacts' social updates, like tweets, in People hub. This is one of my favorite things about the software giant's products. It is also a standout feature that its rivals are not yet offering.
A core component is Facebook integration, which is present in Windows and Windows Phone, as well as Office 365, OneDrive and Outlook.com. But, thanks to an update to Facebook's Graph API, integration with the most-popular social network is going away in all currently-supported products.
The way that Microsoft's products integrate with Facebook is through Graph API. "It brings contact information from your Facebook friends into Outlook.com and the Windows People app, keeps those contacts up-to-date, and provides options in apps and services like Photo Gallery, Movie Maker, and OneDrive.com to share to Facebook", explains Microsoft.
The way users are impacted depends on how Facebook is integrated into Microsoft's products. For instance, in Outlook.com, new users will not be able to connect to Facebook to fetch contacts and their information, while those who have already set this feature up will no longer have that data updated to reflect future changes.
Another good example is the Facebook integration in the Windows 8.1 Calendar app. Normally, this would automatically show all your friends' birthdays, in a dedicated calendar, but since the feature will stop working any new information that is on your Facebook will no longer make its way to Windows 8.1's Calendar. Your friends' birthdays will not change, but any of your new friends' birthdays will not show up, basically.
On OneDrive online, you will no longer have the Publish sidebar, so you can easily post content like photos to Facebook. You will have to do this the old-fashioned way, by manually uploading OneDrive content to the social network.
This is the complete list of affected products:
- Outlook.com Contacts
- Outlook.com, Windows , Windows Phone and Office 365 Calendar sync
- Windows 8.1 People app
- Windows 8 People app
- Windows 8 and Windows 8.1 Calendar app
- Windows 8 Photo Gallery and Movie Maker
- Windows 8 Photos App
- Windows Phone 7 and 8 People app
- Windows Phone 7 and 8 OneDrive
- Windows Phone 7 and 8 Photos
- Windows Live Essentials Calendar and Contacts
- OneDrive Online
- Outlook Social Connector in Outlook 2013
- Office 365 Outlook Web App
To learn more about the way the changes to Facebook's Graph API affect the aforementioned products, hit the link in the third paragraph for the complete product-by-product breakdown.
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